For those who are new to this blog, I run a semi-monthly column of sorts where I track what I have been playing over the previous month. This does a few things but largely it allows me to track over the course of the years what I have been into at a given time. My blog serves as a bit of a record to jog my memory and help me firmly plant when certain events are happening. Also it allows my readers a window into what I am up to and what my thoughts are about a thing in short form. I also generally try and use this moment in time as a point to “true up” my sidebar widget.
To Those Remaining
This one is sorta hanging on by a thread at this point, not for want of desire but more for lack of time. I have however booted it up and made a bit more progress over the past month as well as starting the Switch version. Word of warning, I would say if you are ONLY going to buy a single version of this game, maybe don’t buy the Switch version. It has some slowdown issues and the graphical fidelity are not up to snuff from what I have been used to with the PC version. As it stands I own copies of this I believe for every platform… largely because I want to support the hell out of this title and see more games in this series released.
I have been playing considerably more of Destiny 2 than I had in the months leading up to now. There is a bunch of exciting stuff happening not the least of which is the enabling of Cross Save. I can now play my guardian on every single console platform in addition to the PC and have gone through the process of moving my character from Battle.net to Steam. I am super pumped about the launch of Shadowkeep coming up in October. Of note if you have ever played the PC version then it would behoove you to go through the process of moving your character from BNet to Steam because after October 1st it will not longer be accessible through the BNet client.
I legitimately thought this one would be leaving my list this month. A new season started at the tail end of August and with the impending launch of World of Warcraft Classic a few days later, I fully expected to just skip out on this season. However I found myself once again logging in on a Friday night for the ritual Grace and I have maintained for the last several seasons. It is enough of a thing that it felt weird NOT to be playing Diablo 3 on an opening night. I had a lot of fun and we ran Demon Hunters just to make the season a little easier to complete. I’ve made it as far as unlocking the seasonal rewards and I am not sure if I will push any further.
This one is going to likely maintain a permanent slot on my list. Unfortunately I don’t really have any new screenshots because I no longer play on my phone where it is super easy to take screenshots. On my Galaxy Tab S4 I have to do a complicated volume down and power button to take a shot so I never do it. On my ZTE Axon 7 phone it is a 3 finger gesture to take a shot, and I am wondering if there is a way to restore that functionality to the tablet with an application or something. This game keeps my attention because they keep rolling out new events, with either brand new or revisiting boss encounters for me to play with. I pretty much play enough each night to complete the daily objectives and then head to sleep.
I went from hot and heavy to barely at all on this one. I got in, completed the Shadowbringers story and leveled the Warrior to 80 and my Samurai to 80 as well. Then I disappeared once again because other things released that pulled away my attention. I will continue to play this it fits and spurts for the remainder of this month I am certain, because my attention is being funneled super hard away from almost everything else that I have on my plate. I would really like to level a Magic DPS and a Healer so that I can see all of the Shadowbringers role quests. Still a great game I just am waiting on more story content to drag me back into it.
My attention span for this game has been limited this month, but with the upcoming release content for Throne of Eldraine and the Brawl event happening right now I want to poke my head back in. I have to say though I would play this WAY more if I could play it from my Tablet. My winding down and bed routine would probably include a quick rush through Dragalia dailies and then a few matches of MTGA. I feel like they are missing out on a lot by not having a tablet client, though I guess in theory I could stream this from bed with Parsec. I should investigate how feasible that really is. I sorta wish that I could configure Parsec to work in a sort of console friendly mode where instead of my desktop I am presented with a board of icons of applications to launch.
To The New and Returning
I am a sucker. I did in fact buy this on the PS4 to be able to play it now… when I would way rather have just waited to play it on the PC. The PC version is so superior to the PS4 version for my purposes… however for some reason Capcom is maintaining a staggered schedule of releases. I still love the game and as a result they are getting two purchases from me. I am what is wrong with games and I know I should feel ashamed. I am honestly not sure how much time I will have to devote to this but I really want to poke around and try and get used to a PS4 Controller again.
This is the grand daddy of all things on this list and is consuming the most of my time. As of last night I hit 28 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway to 29. I have plans already made to run Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deep tonight with guildies, and this game is dominating my headspace at the moment. I cannot fully explain why it feels so good but god does it feel good to be back in Vanilla WoW. I knew I would be playing it because Grace had never gotten to experiment, but on some level I fully expected it just to be the two of us running around and doing nonsense. Instead we have a legitimately large guild full of friends all seemingly digging this experience. Long live House Kraken!
To Those Departing
This one largely lost focus somewhere around the Earth Shrine. I probably will return to it because I really like the idea of legitimately playing this without the Four Job Fiesta rules. That said on some level I agree with Ash on this one that the rules actually improve the game. Right now I feel like I need to do all of the things to min-max my characters, whereas playing under the rules dictates my actions. It limits the scope of what is available and causes me to focus on specific strategies. That said now that I know this is a reasonable option I might sign on next year for the Fiesta from my tablet. I just wish this version synced with any other version of the game so I could pop between playing on the PC for example and the tablet. Everything should have cross save.
Summary
The last several months have been pretty stable to be honest with not a lot of changes happening. Mostly a few things shift into focus as a few other things fall out of focus. I expect this month will be about World of Warcraft Classic with a side dish of Monster Hunter World Iceborne and a little bit of Destiny 2 especially as we get closer to the launch of Shadowkeep. Destiny has made me wish that literally every game had cross save if not cross play. I am mostly fine with having to buy a client for each platform, but I would love to be able to carry my characters over to it. There is no reason why Diablo 3 on the switch couldn’t have connected to Battle.net for example, and I have zero excitement over Overwatch Switch as it stands because I fully expect that it will not be connected to Battle.net either. I want more ability to play with my friends on the characters I have already spent time building, because quite frankly I don’t generally have enough bandwidth to level something new.